Criminal Dissent: Are Recent Tactics in Iowa
Part of a Larger Bush Administration Effort to Punish Dissent?
by Bill Berkowitz

www.dissidentvoice.org
February 26, 2004

In
the early 1970s, Guy Goodwin, a Special Prosecutor working for U.S. Attorney
General John Mitchell -- who was soon to become a star player in President
Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal -- convened grand juries across the
country to target radicals, anti-war activists, unions, and others. Goodwin,
characterized by the Center for Constitutional Rights as the "grand
inquisitor of the politically motivated grand jury," was a man on a mission.

Unlike thirty years ago,
the convening of grand juries by John Ashcroft's Department of Justice is
only one weapon in the administration's anti-dissent arsenal, Michael Avery,
President of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) told TomPaine.com in a
telephone interview.

"This administration is
trying to criminalize dissent, characterize protesters as terrorists and
trying to intimidate and marginalize those opposed to its policies," Avery
said. It has opened the floodgates to all kinds of investigative activities
and now "police agencies across the country are actively engaged in spying
and compiling dossiers on citizens exercising their constitutional rights."

In early February, several
decades after Goodwin's salad days, a federal judge in Iowa ordered
officials at Drake University to turn over records about a mid-November
anti-war forum held on its Des Moines campus. Subpoenas were also served on
four activists who attended the forum and the University's chapter of the
National Lawyer's Guild. The subpoena, which sought records identifying the
officers of the Drake chapter in November 2003, the current location of any
local offices, as well as agendas, "has nothing to do with national security
and everything to do with intimidating lawful protestors and suppressing
First Amendment freedom of expression and association," Heidi Boghosian,
Executive Director of the Guild, pointed out in a Guild press release issued
February 6.

U.S. District Judge Ronald
Longstaff also issued an order prohibiting Drake employees from talking
about the University's subpoena. Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the
Washington-based American Association of University Professors, told the
Associated Press that he was not familiar with any other similar situation
where a U.S. university's records were subpoenaed. The case, he pointed out,
has echoes of the "red squads" of the 1950s and campus clampdowns on Vietnam
War protesters.

Within days of the Iowa
grand jury story receiving national headlines, the Justice Department
withdrew the subpoenas. Bruce Nestor, a Minneapolis attorney and past
president of NLG who worked on the case, told TomPaine.com that it was the
"tremendous response from across the political spectrum condemning the use
of the grand jury," that got the subpoenas quashed.

"In the two years since
9/11, we have heard one refrain from the Justice Department every time the
executive branch seeks to arrogate more power to itself: 'trust us, we're
the government,'" Benjamin Stone, Executive Director of the Iowa ACLU,
pointed out. "But, if it is going to be issuing secretive slapdash subpoenas
and then rescinding them to save face, how can we trust that more expansive
surveillance and investigative powers will be used properly?"

"It's really hard to tell
what this means in a broader or policy sense for the Department of Justice,"
Nestor said. "Clearly the FBI memo reported by the New York Times in
October, directed the joint terrorism task forces to compile info about
political protesters. The actions of the U.S. attorney's office in Iowa
appear to be consistent with the directive in that memo.

Whether that means that the
Department of Justice intends to expand the use of the grand jury to
investigate political protest movements is unclear. In this instance they
clearly used the grand jury fore that purpose."

Nationwide police spying

While the convening of the
grand jury in Iowa may have been a DOJ trial balloon or the actions of an
overzealous U.S. attorney, Nestor believes it is part of "a pattern of
events taking place across the country."

During the past year,
police agencies across the country have not only been gathering information,
but have used strong-armed tactics against peaceful political demonstrators.
In early April, acting on warnings from the California Anti-Terrorism
Information Center (CATIC), the Oakland, California police department
indiscriminately fired wooden slugs at and injured several of non-violent
anti-war protesters -- and several non-protesting Port workers as well --
demonstrating at the Port of Oakland.

"You can make an easy kind
of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause
that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have
terrorism at that [protest]," CATIC spokesperson Mike Van Winkle said. "You
can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

In Atlanta, the city's
police department "routinely places under surveillance anti-war protesters
and others exercising their free-speech rights to demonstrate," the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution reported. And in Los Angeles, the police department
maintains files on anti-war protesters it deems capable of "a significant
disruption of the public order." In Miami, the site of the recent police
riot during the November demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the
Americas, "police routinely videotape demonstrators and infiltrate rallies
with plainclothes officers," Detective Joey Giordano of the Miami-Dade
Police Department, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Last year, during the
run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Paul Weyrich, widely recognized as one of
the "founding fathers" of the Christian Right, suggested that either Tom
Ridge, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, or Congress,
launch a full-scale investigation behind the funding sources of what he
termed the "neo-Communist" groups organizing the anti-war movement.

While no full-blown
congressionally-sanctioned investigation of the peace movement has been
initiated, local police departments in cooperation with regional FBI offices
have taken it on their own to establish anti-war investigative units.

"This administration is
using all sorts of tactics to marginalize dissenters," the NLG's Avery
pointed out. "They've used pre-emptive strikes, police violence, and have
resorted to penning off demonstrators in so-called free speech zones, so
that when the president travels around the country people can't get within
several blocks of him." As this time, Avery said he wasn't aware of other
cases involving the convening of grand juries to go after dissenters.

The ACLU, however, pointed
out in press release dated February 10 that "the Justice Department's
decision to quash the [Iowa] subpoenas comes on the heels of reports... that
U.S. Army Intelligence contacted organizers of a seminar at the University
of Texas Law School at Austin on Sexism and Islam."

Local NLG members were
asked by law enforcement officials to provide a list of conference attendees
because persons under investigation had been present. The NLG is concerned
that the University of Texas could be next in line for a Justice Department
fishing expedition. In light of recent events at Drake they have every right
to be wary.

Bill Berkowitz
is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His
WorkingForChange.com column Conservative Watch documents the strategies,
players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.